Saturday, January 23, 2010

Letters to a Zionist friend (4): From blood libeler to reliable witness

OK, at last your insistence has borne fruit and I've watched that video you wanted me to check out:

This is a phone interview with Talal Abu Rahma, a Palestinian journo in Gaza, done during operation Cast Lead. In it, Rahma reports that Hamas members have gone undercover and that he hasn't seen any of them on the streets in the past couple of days. You claim this is the definitive proof that Hamas "hid among civilians," which clears Israel of responsibility for any civilian deaths.

A few questions arise, though. Any Jew reporting Israeli atrocities (the Breaking the Silence soldiers, for instance) is a self-hater according to you: can't there be self-haters among Palestinians? Or more likely still: isn't it possible that Rahma is a Fatah supporter aiming to tarnish Hamas? An examination of Rahma's reporting record is in order.

And our readers won't believe what pops up in the Google search. Mr. Rahma is none other than the journalist who first blamed Israel for the murder of the Palestinian boy Mohammed al-Durrah in October 2000. As was reported at the time:

"They were cleaning the area. Of course they saw the father," says Talal Abu-Rama, the camera man who watched the horror unfold. "They were aiming at the boy, and that is what surprised me, yes, because they were shooting at him, not only one time, but many times."

Now it's not like you've never given your opinion on Mr. Rahma. On the contrary, you've described all people who charged Israel with that murder as antisemites who engaged in the centuries-old blood-libel that Jews murder babies. So if that opinion of yours is sincere, quoting Rahma would be akin to quoting David Irving, David Duke or other certified Jew-haters.

The fact that you yourself are, nevertheless, peddling a video that quotes Rahma proves that you don't believe that accusing Israeli soldiers of having murdered al-Durrah on purpose is by itself a blood libel. We actually don't know what exactly happened that day in Gaza, but that an Israeli soldier or group of soldiers took aim at the child and killed him (out of "bad-appleness," not policy) belongs to the realm of the possible, and any analogy between that speculation and an antisemitic medieval myth is simply yet one more instance of Zionist bad faith.

The sources of data on alleged antisemitic 'incidents' all have a vested interest in finding as many as possible and include all kinds of irrelevant personal remarks, anything comparing Israel to the Nazis, and a wide range of other stuff that has nothing to do with antisemitism. See: http://bureauofcounterpropaganda.blogspot.com/2009/07/jewish-fingernail.html

If you want to know where antisemitism is coming from, ‘Bnei Akiva, the largest religious Zionist youth movement in the world, in partnership with Latet, an Israeli humanitarian aid organization’, assert, ‘As the representative of the Jewish people, the State of Israel is leading the relief effort’. Imagine how Bnei Akiva, or anyone, would react if someone said, ‘As the representative of the Jewish people, the State of Israel is slaughtering and besieging the people of Gaza’! http://warincontext.org/2010/01/23/the-painful-truth-haitis-disaster-is-good-for-the-jews/

Anyone who is really concerned about antisemitism needs to refute the conceit that Israel is 'the representative of the Jewish people'. As long as Israel makes that claim and Jews everywhere accept it, we will be held complicit in Israel's atrocities. In fact, Anonymous, by equating 'Jewish/Israel' like that, you have proven yourself to be an antisemite.

I love the end of the video with men firing in to the sky, as if the IAF wouldn't just drop a bomb on them if they were firing at zionist pawns! More likely that it is footage of internal conflict, don't you think?

"No army other than the Tsahal has ever aimed at children. Not even the Wehrmacht."

That is a fucking despicable joke when you think that 2 million Jewish children were murdered in five years under the nose of your grandparents. More Jewish children were killed in a single DAX during the Holocaust than ALL the children accidentally killed by the IDF since independence.

p.s. saying the Jews "aimed" at killing children, is not simply an ill-informed lie but antisemitic blood libel in its purest traditional form. These kind of comments have been documented as evidence of this site's malicious antisemitic content.

C'mon, this guy works for CNN: have you ever seen a more convincing case of collusion between capitalism, corporate greed and a vacuous and vainglorious 'reporter' culture resulting in a vapid and self-congratulatory product? I wouldn't trust these guys with the US Presidential elections, let alone anything near I/P...

And I still think you should choose your 'Zionist friends' more carefully. Look at his blogroll: Atlas Shrugs, Elder of Ziyon, Simply Jews, Daniel Pipes and Lozowick, to name but a few.

Not sure which Kibbutz/settlement this guy is from but clearly you can take the American Zionist out of America, but you can't take the Conservative out of the American Zionist... Just what they need over there to join the fray, another Far Right nut...

Take a leaf out of my book, buddy, at least mine's a 'liberal Amerisraeli'! ;-)

About Me

I'm a linguist from Rosario, Argentina (the Che's hometown, but no relation whatsoever). I spent a few of my formative years in Spain. Because of my background, some insist I should write about Spain's denial of Basque rights, or about Argentina's mistreatment of the Toba. Instead, I prefer to trash Israel. I'm a very bad boy.